Yet, the proposal Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner showed to House and Senate leaders failed to include any significant cuts, but did, in addition to higher taxes on “on wealthy Americans as well as higher taxes on capital gains and dividends“, it also included a “multiyear stimulus package with at least $50 billion for the 2013 fiscal year.” (The proposal even includes $600 billion in revenue “from unspecified revenue sources.”) Among the other proposal, there is a promise, at some future date, to try to find $400 billion in savings from Medicare and other social programs.

In short, it includes no specific spending cuts.

No wonder Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell “burst into laughter” when Geithner outlined the proposal. He said “nothing good” was “happening” in the negotiations because Obama was unwilling to “embrace serious spending cuts.”

The CNN talker puts the onus on Boehner, not pointing out that the Republican rejected the proposal because it was, well, laughable.

UPDATE: Right after posting this, I caught Paul Mirengoff’s post on the Obama offer; he reports that even the New York Times recognizes that this offer isn’t balanced. So, maybe, now that that pesky election is over with, some in the legacy media aren’t providing Obama the cover they once did:

Times reporter Jonathan Weisman seemed taken aback by the White House’s position. He described the offer as “loaded with Democratic priorities and short on detailed spending cuts.” As far as I can tell, however, there are no detailed spending cuts. Obama did propose some upfront cuts in programs like farm price supports but, according to Weisman, did not specify an amount or any details.

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Please, Dan.

Do you think the concern-troll mike, Aaron, Cinesnatch, and others are going to willingly give this up?

[I]t is now more lucrative – in the form of actual disposable income – to sit, do nothing, and collect various welfare entitlements, than to work. This is graphically, and very painfully confirmed, in the below chart from Gary Alexander, Secretary of Public Welfare, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (a state best known for its broke capital Harrisburg). As quantitied, and explained by Alexander, “the single mom is better off earning gross income of $29,000 with $57,327 in net income & benefits than to earn gross income of $69,000 with net income and benefits of $57,045.“….

In today’s America, it is reasonable to conclude that unless you make a great deal of money, you are a sucker if you work hard. And, in fact, a great many Americans have concluded exactly that. Check out these data, again from the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare. Each 1.25 Americans working in the private sector is supporting 1.0 welfare recipients and government employees–mostly welfare recipients:

And of course, every one of these concern-troll mike halfwits think that the key to our economic future is pushing that ratio even lower. Why? Because their Barack Obama told them that it’s all a lie, that profits are evil, that people being on welfare is better than anything else, and so forth.

You cannot deal with cultists. Obama is a cult leader. He thinks he is the Messiah. His voters like concern-troll mike are beyond intelligent thought at this point; they are voting and making these decisions based on pants creases.

Poison the milk. Let it burn. Producers will survive because we know how to work; moochers and looters like Cinesnatch, concern-troll mike, Aaron, and Levi will not.

I also note the proposal also includes billions in increased spending to subsidize mortgages and another massive “Stimulus” i.e. Taxpayer bailouts for public employee unions and Obama’s donors who own green energy companies.

I know the dickless Republicans will manage to screw it up, but I am increasingly with those who say “Let it burn.” If voters are stupid enough to think tax increases on job creators will solve all of our problems, let’s show them it will fail.

Two more things about Obama’s proposal. 1. It will raise the USA’s corporate tax rate to nearly 40%… the highest in the industrialized world… by a lot. Most countries with whom we compete have corporate tax rates of 25% or lower. Even Sweden cut their corporate tax rate to only 26%. 2. Dividends from investments will also be taxed at 40%.

The Obama proposal essentially declares war on investors and makes our over-regulated economy even less globally competitive.

‎”Obama was permitted by the media to claim, or at least strongly imply, that the painful cuts Romney was talking about (and Obama, the Great Leader, was not talking about) could be averted simply by levying a small tax on the “richest 1%.” It was a lie. It was further a lie the media assisted in. All those Fact Checks and not a single column noting that the central pillar of Barack Obama’s Re-Election Strategy was a baldfaced lie that only the uninformed or innumerate could possibly believe.”

I am sick of this arrogant sob. I was so looking forward to this jerk vacating the White House. Tax the rich and more spending, more class warfare b.s. from the great uniter. If you acutually contribute to the economy, you are the enemy and must be punished. Anyone who can’t see that Washington has a major spending problem should not be allowed to vote. I’m with NDT, let it burn.

1)Since 2011, Entitlement spending and debt service have exceeded total Govt revenue. In other words, they could cut the entirety of the Federal Government’s discretionary budget– no more military, SEC, FBI, EPA, TSA, DHS, IRS, etc.– and still be in the hole by a quarter of a trillion dollars per year.

2) Raising taxes won’t help. Since 1945, US tax receipts in the US have averaged 17.7% of GDP regardless of tax rates. It doesn’t matter how much they increase tax rates– they won’t collect significantly more money; much less the amount needed to close the deficit.

3) GDP growth prospects are tepid at best and recession is looming.

4) Every day 10,000 more people begin receiving mandatory entitlements.

6) Polls show 80% of Americans are concerned about the debt, but 78% oppose cutting entitlements.

Bottom line, the country is going to collapse under the weight of entitlements and debt. And niggling about tax increases and pretend spending cuts will do nothing to avert it.

In 2012 as in 2008, Americans voted for lies and deception. Either they’re slow, or they enjoy self-deception.

“Going over the fiscal cliff” is, at this point, really the right thing to do. At least it begins the (essential, unavoidable) process of spending cuts. And it might bring a few middle- and lower-income Americans back to reality, by making them pay some taxes again.

As people point out, no tax increases are going to raise revenue in the long term (and maybe not even in the short term). A lesson that lefties will put off learning, as long as possible.

Government spending is not the immediate threat to the economy. The big problems with the economy at the moment are unemployment and dragging demand. You don’t fix those problems by cutting government spending, you make them worse.

We need higher taxes to increase government revenues so government can spend more on programs that put people to work and drive up demand. Yes, this adds to the deficit, but only in the short term. The plan isn’t for government spending to always go up in every situation. The plan is to use government spending to fill the void temporarily while business gets back on its feet.

No only are middle and upper-middleclass tax burdens going to increase significantly, financial advisers that I’ve talked to fear that within 5-to-10 years that great hidden tax, Inflation, will be purposely-triggered by the Dhimicrats and the Fed to drive-down the real-value of the US Dollar through use of the printing-press. One reason to allow the Government to pay-off it’s massive paper-debts with devalued inflation-dollars at 20-to-30-cents on the Dollar, thus technically avoiding a Default. And second as a stealth-tax on capital and long-term investments. These devalued US Dollars will also be used to “pay-off” Social Security and government-backed pensions nominally at-par when in reality the purchasing-value of the payouts will be greatly reduced.

And don’t think that your privately-held pensions, IRA’s and 401(k)s are safe. The government can tax them at confiscatory-levels, or seize them at-whim. Just look at what Argentina’s government did…they confiscated every pension and retirement-fund in the country, converted then to low-yield Social Security-like government deferred-pensions and pocketed the difference. And their Courts allowed it. There’s no actual law guaranteeing that your IRA, Keogh or 401(k) keeps it’s tax-status in the future…just a vague promise by the Congress that they can change by-fiat.

Even the non-taxable status of US Government bonds and T-bills are only temporary legally.

The smart money isn’t buying gold; it’s buying productive Midwestern farm land by the hundreds and thousands of acres.

Neither Obama nor the Dems are serious about a balanced approach. Harry Reid said as much when he said we´ve already cut spending, the Republicans know our position, I have yet to see an offer. My fear is that Republicans will cave to avoid being painted as the cause for going over the fiscal cliff. The can will be kicked down the road again. We are on the raod to being another Greece and Spain.

A question Levi cannot answer: “If deficits don’t matter, why do we need to raise taxes on the rich?”

You know it was conservatives that said deficits don’t matter, don’t you? You can’t really hold me accountable for something that one of your guys said. Ideally, we wouldn’t be running a deficit, but the economy isn’t in an ideal place. You’re supposed to run deficits when the economy is in recession. Spend money to make money. The deficit does not have nearly the urgency that conservatives would have us believe, and you guys don’t know anything about economics anyway.

Sure it is. Anyone who considers the facts – and who isn’t a fascist, a worshipper of the State – knows that. Since you are a worshipper of the State, you just don’t care to admit it.

The big problems with the economy at the moment are unemployment and dragging demand.

No, those are only symptoms. The big problems are TOO MUCH DEBT and TOO MUCH GOVERNMENT. Government must be cut, and drastically, before we begin to arrive at solution for unemployment or for so-called “dragging demand”. Since you are a committed worshipper of the State, you just don’t want to admit it.

We need higher taxes to increase government revenues

But they won’t.

so government can spend more on programs that put people to work

But they don’t.

and drive up demand

All it will drive up is, the prices of essentials that people actually need, such as food and gas.

[Higher spending] adds to the deficit, but only in the short term.

No, in the long term. Deficits are already over a trillion a year, year after year. You won’t solve that by making them worse. You’re just repeating a talking point that Joe Biden was saying in early 2009 – and was totally wrong about.

The plan isn’t for government spending to always go up in every situation.

Sure it is, Levi. That is always the left-wing plan. You just lie to people about it, refusing to admit it.

The plan is to use government spending to fill the void temporarily while business gets back on its feet.

But business can NEVER get back on its feet, while Obama spending continues. Obama’s over-spending, and the other measures of Obama’s war on business, are THE VERY THING PREVENTING business from getting back on its feet.

As a committed worshipper of the State, you just don’t want to admit it.

Actually Ted, it’s buying both. Farm land is inaccessible to many smaller investors, not being sold in an ETF (yet). The smart money is also buying guns and survival supplies, and perhaps Emerging Market stocks (the fact that they’re down is a good thing; smart money by definition buys low, sells high).

BTW I love this interaction that just happened.

[V] A question Levi cannot answer: “If deficits don’t matter, why do we need to raise taxes on the rich?”
[Levi] You know it was conservatives… [blah blah blah, change the subject to "conservatives" with hand-waving misinformation]

Thus not answering the question; proving V’s point.

The deficit does not have nearly the urgency that conservatives would have us believe…

Thus proving that, actually, Levi does not give a hoot about the deficit; he only pretends to occasionally, in concern-troll fashion.

But business can NEVER get back on its feet, while Obama spending continues. Obama’s over-spending, and the other measures of Obama’s war on business, are THE VERY THING PREVENTING business from getting back on its feet.

As a committed worshipper of the State, you just don’t want to admit it.

Admit what? You’ve got nothing. The stock market is up. Unemployment is trending in the right direction. Corporations are more profitable than ever. The tax burden on the richest is lower than it’s been for decades. All of this comes 4 years after President Obama got elected, at which point the likes of you were predicting all manner of economic calamities that simply haven’t come to fruition.

I wonder, if Obama inherited the worst economic conditions in decades when he took office, why aren’t we a lot worse off? I mean, if he’s the incompetent moron with no economic intelligence that you say he is, shouldn’t he have inherited the recession and turned it into a depression? Especially with all those Democrats running around in the House and Senate. I would think that if someone was going to crush the economy with their bumbling and their arrogance, then that should probably happen when the economy is at its weakest point, no?

And yet here you are, 4 years into Obama’s term, talking about how Obama’s spending is just about to get us all killed. And how does that work, exactly? Oh that’s right, businesses don’t want to invest/expand/hire because they’re so unsure about the future, is that it? Obama’s government spending is making everybody nervous, right? That’s the problem with government spending, according to conservatives, as far as I can tell. And just like the rest of your supply-side bullshit, this too is magical thinking that exposes the true meaning of conservatism: catering to the rich. Rich people deserve tax cuts. Rich people deserve promises from the government that their taxes will never increase. Rich people should never have to put any of their money at risk. And then, but ONLY then, will the rich people spray all the rest of us bottom-feeders with jobs and cash and opportunities. If only Obama would pat their bottoms tell them how special they are, this unemployment problem would vanish overnight…. is that about right?

Actually, the incoherency from thread to thread of the fascists Levi and Aaron is hilarious.

First Levi rants this on one thread:

The big problems with the economy at the moment are unemployment and dragging demand. You don’t fix those problems by cutting government spending, you make them worse.

Comment by Levi — November 30, 2012 @ 10:31 am – November 30, 2012

And then Aaron rants on another thread that stimulating demand by allowing people to keep more of their own money and encouraging them to spend is economic stupidity:

I’m not talking about fake wars like the ones the Republicans started. The ones where we decided to lower taxes, encourage shopping, and hope the war would pay for itself through imagined oil revenues.

And as far as confiscation of land? They’re already confiscating wealth, they’re already planning to confiscate 401(k)s, and with Kelo, they’ll just confiscate land in the name of the “public good” or “rationing”. After all, remember their argument:

I mean, even if the government forced everyone in the country to not eat meat for one day per week, would that really be grounds to compare them to Soviet Russia?

Comment by Levi — November 30, 2012 @ 7:29 am – November 30, 2012

What happens when society has to start making tough decisions? Not BS like Meatless Mondays, I’m talking about real problems like population control. Or water/resource rationing.

I never said that deficits don’t matter. Deficits do matter, and that’s why we should raise taxes on the rich. I can’t answer any question that begins with, “If deficits don’t matter,” because I disagree with that sentiment and would never make an argument with that presumption.

At any given time, the deficit should be minimized. When things are going well, we shouldn’t be adding to the deficit. When things are going bad, we might need to run deficits, but they should be as small as possible. In these situations, you raise taxes to make the deficit as small as possible. Duh?

So go back to the George Bush years, when you had people running the government saying that deficits didn’t matter, you see huge expansions in federal spending and tax cuts for rich people that didn’t need them. This is the absolute worst way to run a deficit. It’s like buying a Ferrari on the day you quit your job. This is exactly the kind of behavior you would expect from a group of irrational who, in their own words, believe that ‘deficits don’t matter.’ And these people were conservatives. And among conservatives, they still remain extremely popular, even compared to Barack Obama, who has never done anything nearly as irrational regarding deficits as invading a country while handing out tax cuts. I know you guys hate the Democrats and I know you hate spending, but I think you’d be a little more upset at your crowd, since they’re the people who ostensibly agree with you.

Instead, I guess you’ll just accuse me of saying that deficits don’t matter, because why not? You’re making this shit up as you go along. Hate me and call me stupid for saying something that I never said, and then you can get right back to deciding where Dick Cheney ranks among the greatest conservatives of all time.

Under terms of the February loan restructuring, two private investors — Argonaut Ventures I LLC and Madrone Partners LP — stand to be repaid before the U.S. government if the solar company is liquidated. The two firms gave the company a total of $69 million in emergency loans. Argonaut is an investment vehicle of the George Kaiser Family Foundation — headed by billionaire George Kaiser, a major Obama campaign contributor and a frequent visitor to the White House. Kaiser raised between $50,000 and $100,000 for Obama’s 2008 campaign, federal election records show.

Next:

And then, but ONLY then, will the rich people spray all the rest of us bottom-feeders with jobs and cash and opportunities. If only Obama would pat their bottoms tell them how special they are, this unemployment problem would vanish overnight…. is that about right?

In the 2010 State of the Union address, Obama mentioned Solyndra as another successful investment by the government in private-sector green-energy companies:

“You can see the results of last year’s investments in clean energy. A North Carolina company that will create 1,200 jobs nationwide helping to make advanced batteries. Or in the California business, that will put a thousand people to work making solar panels,”

Solyndra, that California business, received a $535 million loan guarantee from the government before going bankrupt last September. Its top executives were enthusiastic Obama campaign donors. Solyndra had also spent nearly $1.8 million lobbying the government prior to receiving the loan guarantee.

Confiscating 100% of the wealth of the billionaires in the United States would raise $1.3 trillion.

Confiscating 100% of the wealth of anyone making more than $200k in the United States would raise $2.4 trillion.

Your ignorance and incoherence is now laid bare for everyone to see, Levi. You screamed and cried and pissed yourself that deficits would vanish if we just hiked taxes on the rich; facts show that that is a mathematical impossibility.

To put it in blunt terms, the US takes in approximately $2.3 trillion in income taxes per year. Double everyone’s tax rate, and you couldn’t even pay the amount of deficit that your Obama has run up in three years.

And what are you doing with this money now? <a href="You're using it to guarantee that multimillionaire Obama donors never have to put any of their money at risk and claiming that, by doing so, the rich people will spray all the rest of us bottom-feeders with jobs and cash and opportunitie — and then, when that doesn't pan out, saying it doesn't matter.

Perhaps you should educate yourself before commenting, ignorant child. Then you wouldn’t end up looking like a hypocritical fool.

Farm land is inaccessible to many smaller investors, not being sold in an ETF (yet).

Many of the private family investment trusts and small private hedge funds have shifted to farmland purchases since you can buy land or “shares” in land for in the $500k to $10-million range quite easily. Private investment syndicates are being formed where they’ll partner with a well-capitalized local invester-farmer where they put up the money and he manages the land…basically the opposite of sharecropping. Often a large land-owning family will use the private syndicate-market as a way to cash-out the non-farming heirs without saddling the land-inheriting family member with a huge mortgage to buy-out the other heirs. Often this is combined with buying-out whole farms where no-one in the family still farms…and the farmer-member of the syndicate farms the acreage along with his own. Or they lease the acreage-outright. That’s common here in my part of NJ where many of the successful “farmers” don’t actually own any productive acreage themselves….yet they lease-farm hundreds and even thousands of acres for their efficiencies-of-scale without the crushing load of expensive land purchase mortgages.

Levi – the problem with raising taxes on the rich isn’t raising taxes on the rich… it the fact that it’s pointless. From what I’ve read, the additional revenue (which assumes that nothing changes as a result of the tax) would run the government for just over a week.

If our budget deficits could be tamed with the additional tax revenue claimed, I’d be all for it. But that won’t happen. Tax revenues have, since WW-II, hovered just under 20 percent of GPD – regardless of the rates.

The problem is government spending – now at 40 percent of GDP (local, state, federal). The only time it’s been higher was during WW-II.

The government is printing and spending money with wild abandon with what, exactly, to show for it? No world wars won, no Manhattan project, no interstate highways, no moon landings. Instead, we get Obamaphones, Solyndra, make-work programs that create few, if any, jobs, and a real risk of collapse. You think it can’t happen? Wait until the rest of the world decides it doesn’t need the dollar. The FED is already buying a substantial amount of government debt (can you say failed treasure auction>).

I, for one, don’t believe that this is a matter of Obama and the Dems not knowing what they’re doing. They know exactly what they’re doing.

Harry Reid has said that entitlements are off the table – we can’t even talk about raising the retirement age for people retiring 30 years from now. If nothing is done, it won’t make any difference what the age is since we’ll be kaput.

I’m with Charles Krauthammer – the conservatives should just walk away… let the Dems and the voters have what they’ve been asking for. If the Dems are right then we will have learned a valuable lesson (but I’m not betting they are).

Vast welfare states have collapsed all over the place but, this time, it will be different… Really?

That’s a point I’ve made repeatedly, SoCalRob. The first Stimulus was over a trillion dollars. Is there even 1 piece of new, enduring, economically useful piece of infrastructure to show for it? No, because it was wasted on stupid crap like teaching African men to wash their pee-pees.

Levi – the problem with raising taxes on the rich isn’t raising taxes on the rich… it the fact that it’s pointless. From what I’ve read, the additional revenue (which assumes that nothing changes as a result of the tax) would run the government for just over a week.

If our budget deficits could be tamed with the additional tax revenue claimed, I’d be all for it. But that won’t happen. Tax revenues have, since WW-II, hovered just under 20 percent of GPD – regardless of the rates.

The problem is government spending – now at 40 percent of GDP (local, state, federal). The only time it’s been higher was during WW-II.

That’s more magical thinking. In reality, the tax cuts are one of the primary drivers of the deficit and when coupled with Bush’s war, account for about half of it (most of the rest can be directly attributed to the recession, with Evil Obama’s Horrible Descent Into Socialism Recovery Act accounts for maybe 10%.

All the rich people took their tax cuts and invested it in the stock market and real estate, which only compounded the effects of the recession. If Bush had not given out those tax cuts, not only would the deficit be smaller, but the financial crisis would not have had the same impact. Tax cuts for rich people, which are advocated for by rich people and which are passed by rich people, do not make any sense in our current situation, and they should be ended.

The government is printing and spending money with wild abandon with what, exactly, to show for it? No world wars won, no Manhattan project, no interstate highways, no moon landings. Instead, we get Obamaphones, Solyndra, make-work programs that create few, if any, jobs, and a real risk of collapse. You think it can’t happen? Wait until the rest of the world decides it doesn’t need the dollar. The FED is already buying a substantial amount of government debt (can you say failed treasure auction>).

I, for one, don’t believe that this is a matter of Obama and the Dems not knowing what they’re doing. They know exactly what they’re doing.

Harry Reid has said that entitlements are off the table – we can’t even talk about raising the retirement age for people retiring 30 years from now. If nothing is done, it won’t make any difference what the age is since we’ll be kaput.

Entitlements did not cause the recession, nor are entitlements the reason the recession hasn’t turned around. The financial industry caused the recession, and it seems to me that they should be more on the line for getting things fixed. Conveniently enough, since the financial industry is composed almost exclusively of rich people, you can do that by raising taxes on the rich. Why should grandparents and disabled veterans have to be responsible for the recovery? And why should those responsible for the recession in the first place escape without consequence?

I’m with Charles Krauthammer – the conservatives should just walk away… let the Dems and the voters have what they’ve been asking for. If the Dems are right then we will have learned a valuable lesson (but I’m not betting they are).

Vast welfare states have collapsed all over the place but, this time, it will be different… Really?

Tax increases in 1992 and 1994 created huge economic growth, so this is a lesson that the rest of the world has learned in the very recent past.

If Republicans had any confidence in their own economic theories, they would abandon the negotiations, pass whatever Obama wanted them to pass, and spend the next 2 years talking about how they gave Obama his shot. Come 2014 and 2016, they would then be perfectly positioned to tell the American electorate that Obama got his way and that the Democrats alone are responsible for the state of the economy. This will never happen, because Republican leadership recognize that the economy is likely to improve if Obama gets to enact the kind of legislation he wants. For Republicans, the only choice is to obstruct. They can’t afford to give Obama a chance to fix things, because what if it works?

That’s why the Republicans won’t walk away. To be sure, what you and Charles Krauthammer suggested is exactly what Republicans should want to do if they had confidence, both in the reliability of their own economic theories and in the defects of liberal economic theories. They would put it all on Obama, and make firm predictions about the fallout of his policies. It should trouble you that they aren’t doing this, and instead doubling down on the strategy of obstruction that didn’t seem to serve them very well in the election.

That’s more magical thinking. In reality, the tax cuts are one of the primary drivers of the deficit and when coupled with Bush’s war, account for about half of it (most of the rest can be directly attributed to the recession, with Evil Obama’s Horrible Descent Into Socialism Recovery Act accounts for maybe 10%.